The psychedelic explorer’s guide: safe, therapeutic, and sacred journeys

A critical book review of James Fadiman's The Psychedelic Explorer's Guide finds the work frustrating and unlikely to persuade skeptics. The book is clearly structured but opens with controversial material without preparatory data. Fadiman acts more as editor than author, compiling extracts that are disparate in tone and lacking overall synthesis. His informal, personal writing style undermines scientific credibility. The book's ethical stance is mixed: it responsibly advises against illegal activity and includes safety warnings, but assumes readers have personal psychedelic experience and implies such experience is necessary to understand the research. Fadiman's spirituality is presented as fact without theological grounding.

Study at a glance

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size James Fadiman, PhD, certainly has a central position in alternative academic research. He has been researching, and sometimes using, psychedelics for the last 40 years; you cannot deny that he has experience. This book is surrounded with praise, on the back and inner leaf, so he is clearly held in great esteem by others in the field. But unfortunately, his book is presented in a sensationalist way. It is geared towards an audience already primed to receive its message, and not the wider scientific community. This may not be Fadiman’s fault.How to be fair to the positives, negatives, and ambiguities of this volume? Let’s look at it one theme at a time: first writing and structure (including resources and paratexts), then the ethics expounded, the politics and history, the use of sources, and the disciplinary and academic practice.The book is very clearly structured. In the introductory section “What this book contains”, Fadiman takes us through the parts and chapters, offering a clear map for what is to follow. Not that this is likely to persuade those who are wary of this area of study, however; by opening with a chapter called “Meeting the Divine Within: Part One: Guidelines for Voyagers and Guides”, he jumps into the more controversial parts of the book feet first, without offering any data or studies to prepare the way. This is unlikely to benefit his cause.This book is not just the voice of Fadiman, but of many people; it contains numerous selections and extracts from the writings of others. It’s helpful of Fadiman to bring these pieces together, but all too often he is acting as an editor and anchorman instead of an author. And this leads to chapters which are very disparate in tone, content, and approach. Unfortunately, whilst Fadiman manages to tie these extracts together in individual parts and chapters, he fails to do so in the book overall. And when he writes himself, it is frequently very personal, lacking in distance and objectivity, and offering far too many details of his life and history. Certainly he has an engaging way with words, and what he writes is not unpleasant to read, but the informal tone does not serve the scientific parts of his book well.The Psychedelic Explorer’s Guide is very heavily tied into a set of online resources – networks, articles, and blogs – provided by Fadiman and others. This is a really useful feature, because it allows the reader of the book (now four years old) to immediately access research that has been updated since its publication, and immerse themselves easily in the world from which Fadiman speaks. At one point Fadiman states that the database of findings from some questionnaires, handed out to students at San Francisco State University and the delegates of a conference on psychedelics, will be placed online for future researchers. I have searched for this database and cannot find it. This willingness to be open and share the results of research sets an example for all academics.Now for ethics, on which Fadiman has strong views, and moral judgments, which he frequently makes. He takes a responsible position early on, noting that neither he nor his book advocate illegal activity. He also explicitly says that psychedelics are not suitable for everyone, all the time, and conscientiously includes a chapter “Things Can Go Wrong”. If you are going to use entheogenic substances, Fadiman and the anonymous members of the Guild of Guides make sensible comments about having expectations for your experience, and taking care with your thought processes and actions both before and after the event. They emphasize the responsibilities, values, and transparency of the guide, and stress that there should be a safe relationship between guide and voyager.Fadiman also recognizes that our approach to using entheogenic substances for therapy is “a cognitive mess and a philosophical morass” (72). This book is not a call for people to begin practice immediately, but for research which will help understand the potential of such activities. He discusses how people bias their research to produce positive spin, but without asking if the same is true of himself.Some of the ethics in this book are more dubious. Firstly, Fadiman assumes that most readers will have had their own psychedelic experience. Not necessarily, and if you want to reach new audiences, you can’t presume that they will agree with or have the same moral stances as you. Then in the last chapter, he implies that you have to have used psychedelics in order to understand research into them: not a persuasive argument. What’s the point of recording scientific data if people can’t make judgments on that alone? The emphasis on experience acts to protect his work and himself from criticism.The guidelines for the entheogenic journey are also very controlling in a number of ways, from the setting through the choice of the music right down to the rosebud offered for contemplation at the end. Apparently the music should have no lyrics, so that it does not influence the experience of the participant, which is disingenuous when you consider the theatrical setup of the whole affair. The ideal journey takes place, for Fadiman and the Guild, in a context framed to provide their own very specific version of a positive voyage. In any case their presentation and description of the hallucinogenic experience within this book – the classic one of bright colors, proximity to oneness, nature, and divinity – could have as much influence on experience as the drugs themselves. Context matters.Fadiman’s emphasis on spirituality will disturb some of his audience. Readers usually expect an author’s views to be well interrogated, thought through, and understood; we also like to be presented with clear evidence of that process. But Fadiman’s version of spirituality, most notably the divine unity of all things, is taken as given fact. This would be less problematic if the book gave us some idea of his theology. But it does not; we are left in the dark about this man’s values, with no comeback if we happen to disagree with them.There are also some unintentional presumptions about society in Fadiman’s book, which is a pity if he wants people generally to share his ideas. He assumes gender binaries, researching male and female differences and suggesting that the voyager have both male and female guides available to them. More overtly, he states at one point that “in general, we would expect this kind of psychedelic session to be more fruitful with gifted individuals” (135). What, precisely, does Fadiman mean by “gifted”, and who is he to decide the value of a personal event to any given soul? Tied up in this statement are presumptions about the nature of intelligence and about access to education, which can distinctly affect a person’s capability to live up to their potential. Divisions of gender and privilege in learning are not issues that should matter to someone who has seen the unity of all things.The background to this book is tangled and messy. The cessation of research into psychedelics in the late 1960s led to disruption and change in the lives of many professionals, whether they stayed within the establishment or left it. So it is not surprising that political and historical issues crop up throughout The Psychedelic Explorer’s Guide. Fadiman has thought carefully about the past of his field. He offers a number of sociological and political reasons for the termination of research – the degenerating hippie scene of late 1960s San Francisco, fears that drug use was on the rise and was turning people against authority, and misconceptions about how drugs might become contaminated. He understands how intimately psychoactives have connected with disruptive and anti-establishment movements, even if he exaggerates their power to cause unrest. People are perfectly capable of rebellion without having taken entheogens.Fadiman’s views on government and institutions, present and past, range from ambiguous to cynical. The medical fraternity, for instance, are dismissed as closed-minded antagonists. And this is understandable. His research, which was quite legal, and in which he had invested so much time and energy, was shut down; this cannot have been an easy thing to take. He tries not to judge too harshly, and would like to engage and open a dialogue – but always in the background there remains an implication that the establishment is bad. He makes important and subtle points about why governments might either support or prevent particular lines of research, depending on pressures from individuals or from moneyed interests. He argues that the criminalization of drug use has driven it into disreputable and dangerous sections of society, as with alcohol under Prohibition.Fadiman’s most important concern is academic freedom, and the dangers of universities depending on governmental biases and fluctuating interests. Research should not be conducted to hit fashionable targets, and it should not take place in an environment of fear, as his has. It is only through free research that society, culture, and science can develop. Fadiman should be applauded for championing this, if nothing else.Fadiman uses diverse sources ‒ one of the most interesting aspects of this book, despite the irregularities of tone that it creates. The book is framed, after the introduction, with a selection from Stewart Brand’s “Vision of a Whole Earth”. This is an interesting and creative device, personal and humorous. Academics should be more usefully performative in their choice of sources and the way they present things. Fadiman is also careful to identify the authors of the extracts he has taken, which is laudable, though some of these get rather hagiographic introductions.There are issues, however, with the way he uses his sources. In the chapter on “Experiences of Psychedelic Pioneers”, he presents firsthand accounts from several texts, but does not state where these begin or end in the extract. As for the research reports written by Fadiman himself, it is hard to tell when they were written, and how much they have been edited or altered afterwards. “The Therapeutic Effectiveness of Single Guided Sessions” is one example of this. It derives from research done 40 years ago, which doesn’t alter the facts and statistics, but does affect their interpretation. Mostly Fadiman does not analyze in any real detail the reports that he presents and reviews, and this is something which damages the book’s credibility as a critical piece. Similarly, when case studies are quoted in one chapter from two architects and six professionals, we do not know how much they have been edited and why. We are told that some of the points within one particular report have been omitted, with no explanation given.Fadiman does not have much to say about many of the personal reports which he cites. He does not tell us much about where he found them, nor address the problems of selection processes, including experimenter bias, participant self-selection, and the observer-expectancy effect. This is particularly evident in the chapter on sub-perceptual doses, especially since there has been little formal research in this area.So how does the book stands up against best or ideal practice, in its own discipline or in more general academic writing? The chapter “Breakthrough Research” shows some evidence of good scientific practice, using pre-existing and accepted tests, and taking a good deal of care in choosing the subjects. But other studies by Fadiman are defective in design. He fails to recognize his own biases or the way in which his presence, demeanor, and the theatrical setup of his experiments can induce the observer-expectancy effect, though he notes it in the work of others. In the chapter “Facilitation for Enhanced Problem Solving”, the use of psychedelics is placed in a context very much outside the normal lab test routine, partly because the experimenter had found that lab tests provided very uninteresting results. This is blamed on the setting. In rebuff to this, it would be worth experimenting with pharmaceuticals in contexts as ritualized as those chosen for the psychedelics. Would they be different then, or more effective?It would be good to hear more about the relationships and patterns of influence of the first, second and third waves of “Psychedelic Pioneers”, who are given a chapter to express their experience in their own words. The texts themselves are quite repetitive, and it would have been more informative to see them woven together and analyzed as history, not just presented as so much filler.That said, Fadiman is brave in presenting research which is still at an early stage and chronicling his own behavior and developing self-awareness. His book reminds us that academic entrenchment and stasis are bad things, and that research is inherently a process of questioning and change for individuals and for the discipline. Other academics would do well to recognize that society cannot be improved if those with the power to change it are unwilling to recognize their own flaws and attempt to resolve them.But in the end, The Psychedelic Explorer’s Guide is a frustrating book. We can’t all be believers, but those of us who are sceptics are still open to conversion. Sadly, though, this book didn’t quite manage to convert me, for all of the reasons cited above, and for one more. The central problem of this book, which will prevent it from achieving success and persuading readers, is its framing. Its publisher, its cover, its emphasis on entheogenic experience and spirituality: all of these place it very firmly within a context of hippy alternativism.Contexts, of many kinds, are the issue throughout – the way in which Fadiman and his colleagues contextualize the experience of the psychedelic voyage, the historical context of the “closure of the doors of perception” (183) in the 1960s, the cultural associations of LSD and other such substances, the context of alternative lifestyle choices, and the context of academia today: these all rub up against each other to produce a book with a complex but intriguing character.The Psychedelic Explorer’s Guide is several things – part exposition of research old and new, part polemic, part guide, and part clarion call. Both frustrating and fascinating, it is at times a testing read, but perhaps in some ways, a worthwhile one.Jenny WalklateUniversity of Leicesterjenny.walklate@gmail.com© 2014, Jenny Walklate